Many menu items which are currently staples of the various national restaurant chains were originally innovated in much smaller scale restaurants by influential chefs (generically referred to herein as “fine dining”). While many fine dining items may never make their way into the mainstream national chains, others do. It is advantageous for national restaurant chains to keep abreast of developments in fine dining, and accurately predict future trends, so that they can navigate the fine line between being uninteresting and out-of-date and becoming too extreme for mainstream tastes.
Current methods and system for menu analysis actually offer relatively little analysis. Instead, a raw quantification of menu items is typically generated from a large number of menus. Usually, the objective is to assemble as large an array of menus as possible. While this approach generates a limited amount useful data for national restaurant chains, further improvements are possible.